


as a flower does

by inlay



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Bullying, Character Study, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Intrigue, M/M, Unrequited Love, half the crew are teenagers and half are still adults, look i tried to get k2 in but i couldn't do it i'm so sorry, shady shit, the Partisans are a teenage gang, this is not that cute high school au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-31
Updated: 2017-03-31
Packaged: 2018-10-13 04:11:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10506102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlay/pseuds/inlay
Summary: At sixteen years old, Bodhi Rook knows what his life entails: running messages for the mysterious company his foster parents work for, trying not to get beaten up at school, and waiting to feel like he belongs somewhere.When Bodhi begins to fall into the orbit of Galen Erso—his new neighbour, and father of his new detention buddy, Jyn—everything he knows about himself and his life suddenly becomes uncertain.





	

**Author's Note:**

> alternative description for this fic: flowers and flying and trauma, oh my!
> 
> me, a couple months ago: hmmm i've always been supremely disinterested in au's but maybe i'll write a short rebelcaptain one where they're in high school and jyn and galen just moved to cassian's town and bodhi lives next door to them and ha what if bodhi and galen became pals and--  
> me: wait. let's Hyper Focus on that last bit right there
> 
> so here is the very specific story no one wanted. i'm sorry?? also, k2 isn't in this because i cannot write human k2, i don't know, it just felt wrong, but also...he is almost in this. and this is a modern au, but like a modern au in a slightly parallel universe, so a couple things are different, like technological advances, and maybe like...the childcare system *shrugs*
> 
> also my computer doesn't have spell check so there may be a couple typos
> 
> in reference to the implied child abuse tag, there are some specifics i didn't want to tag because they're a spoiler, so check the end notes if you would like to know before reading!

Bodhi Rook is on his knees in his mother's crushed red flowerbed when he meets Galen Erso for the first time. The back of his throat tastes the way burning metal smells, and a thick string of saliva dangles down to connect his mouth and the one flower his body hasn't flattened. He's breathing heavily. It's dark, and his own sick is shiny underneath him.

His parents laugh somewhere in his house, tinny, and a whirl of nausea clutches at his insides again. He clenches against it—shivers.

Someone says something. It's indistinct, but it's nearby; he registers sound, but not words. He looks up, and a man is on the front stoop of the house across the street, the one that still has the FOR SALE sign on the lawn, the words freshly crossed out.

The man wavers in Bodhi's vision, and starts to move towards him. His shoes are bright black next to the flowers when he stops.

“I don't think that's how you water plants,” he says.

Bodhi swipes a hand at his mouth and misses, smearing saliva—hopefully only that—across his cheek. He says nothing.

“Are you alone?” the man asks. He has a strange accent, with a measured sort of cadence that strikes Bodhi's ears as soothing.

“I live here,” Bodhi says.

“In a flower bed?”

“It's my flowerbed.”

The man is silent for a moment longer.

“I suppose that makes us neighbours,” he says. “As your flowerbed appears to be across from my house.”

Bodhi waits for him to leave, or worse: get Bodhi's parents. He does neither.

“I'm not drunk,” Bodhi says.

“I'm sure that's a big comfort to the flowers,” the man says. “Are you alone?”

It means something different the second time. Bodhi knows the man can hear his parents because he can still hear them. The laughter is still happening. Bodhi was supposed to be at a meeting for a group project. He was not supposed to have overheard.

“I'm fine,” Bodhi says.

“Either you are not fine, and you do not want anyone to know,” the man says. “Or your family is happy to leave you in your yard like this.”

The urge to throw up is returning. He must have misheard. His parents cannot be those kind of people.

He opens his mouth to say something, but a choked kind of sound is all that can come out. He's crying in his front yard next to a stranger with black shoes, and the intensity of it cripples him. Tears make his whole face feel like tight, melting plastic. He's spiraling out of himself.

A touch on his head brings it all slamming to a stop. His eyes clear, the edges of a tulip coming into sharp relief below him, cup-like under his face. There's a hand resting against his hair, gentle and warm and big. It's brief, and when it's gone, he goes dizzy again with longing. He looks up.

“Let's get you inside,” the man says.

****

Bodhi's parents always make anyone he brings home call them “Mr. and Mrs. Rook”, at least back when Bodhi had friends to bring over, but Mr. Erso tells Bodhi to call him Galen. Over a bowl of cereal, he asks Bodhi his age—sixteen—and tells him he has a daughter who should be in his grade.

“She's asleep now,” Galen says. “Or should be.”

The microwave blinks 1:15am. Galen smiles in that way adults do when they're commiserating with each other about the recklessness of youth. It's strange for Bodhi to have that smile aimed at him. Mr. Erso has a look of perpetual tiredness about him. His deepset eyes are kind.

“Are you feeling better?” Galen asks.

Bodhi pushes fruit loops around the bowl with his spoon. They're brighter than he'd thought they'd be, almost as bright as on the packaging. In his experience, things tend to be duller than they look on the outside. He shrugs.

“You don't look ill.”

Bodhi wonders if Galen will press his hand to Bodhi's forehead to check for a fever. He hides his shudder in a scoop for more cereal.

“I'm not,” he mumbles. “Just ate something bad, I guess.”

“Well, it didn't curb your appetite.”

Bodhi stops eating, stricken. Galen laughs.

“That was not a criticism, Bodhi.”

“Are you going to tell my parents?” Bodhi asks, and it's not about the cereal.

Galen regards him carefully. He looks like a man who does everything carefully. This is something of a novelty to Bodhi, who has been surrounded by rush and bluster his whole life.

“Are you in any kind of trouble, son?” Galen asks.

“No,” Bodhi says automatically. He swallows. Fruit loops stick to his teeth. “No, I'm fine.”

He has never had someone look at him so closely and steadily, and he can't decide if the warmth of it is uncomfortable or safe. The kitchen in here is smaller than in his own house, even though they are separated by only a road. Everything is different here.

“In that case, if you can finish that whole bowl, I see no reason to alert the forces,” Galen says.

This time, when he smiles, Bodhi smiles back.

****

He has to run a message for his parents after school the next day. His father presses an envelope into his hand over breakfast, smiling. He tells Bodhi that someone will be waiting around the back of the cornerstore next to his high school, around 2pm.

“Shouldn't be a problem for you to duck out of class, right?” he says.

Bodhi nods. His toast sits thickly in his mouth, resisting every attempt to swallow.

His father's mustache twitches. “Good sport.”

Bodhi's mother snaps his plate away from him and tosses it haphazardly in the sink.

“Some drunk kid threw up in my flowers last night,” she mutters. “Not one of your friends, would it be?”

“No,” Bodhi says, but he clearly didn't need to; his father is already laughing at the idea.

“'Course not,” he says. “Margaret, we're going to be late.”

They crowd around the door, putting on their boots. They look the same as they always have—mouths a little small, sunken chests and fast, pale hands—but to Bodhi, they seem transformed.

“Don't take too long cleaning up,” his mother calls over her shoulder. “If that secretary calls me again about you being late to school, I'm going to commit a murder.”

His father laughs again, rumbling in his throat. When Bodhi was little, he'd thought that laugh was nice, and would hover at the edges of rooms, hoping to hear it. He can hear dirt in it now.

After his parents have left, he clears the table of their dishes and turns on the tap to fill the sink. He picks up the envelope so he can wipe the table, and it's heavy in his hand. Water bubbles behind him, greedy. The envelope is sealed. He imagines opening it, and it feels like the water is pouring down into his lungs, drowning him.

The sink overflows; Bodhi is late for school. He begs the secretary not to call home, and he delivers the message without looking at it, the way he was asked to, the way he has since he was nine years old. He's running on a treadmill, going nowhere. If he stops, he'll fly off.

****

He can see into the living room of the house across the street through their bay window. Galen is sitting on a soft-looking blue couch when Bodhi comes home from school, and he's reading, a pair of glasses settled low on his nose. Bodhi pauses with one foot on the sidewalk and one foot on his own walkway, watching him. The sun is going down, one fat strip of it draping over Galen's crossed thighs. Bodhi is warm in it.

Galen looks up after a moment, and his smile is visible even from across the road. He raises a hand, and Bodhi automatically waves back, his heart pounding. Galen uncrosses his legs, like he's making to stand, and Bodhi panics. He runs up the walkway to his door, fumbling with his keys. His back is burning under the touch of the sun.

He doesn't allow himself to look back across the road until he's inside, peering through the tiny porthole on the door. Galen is no longer looking towards him, engrossed again in his book.

****

Bodhi dreams of a hand on his head.

****

Bodhi's Mom and Dad are only fosters, but they'd asked him to call them his parents, and they'd told him that they wanted him. He'd bounced around from group home to group home from the age of three to nine, and when he got here, he was told he was wanted. Adoption takes a long time though, and the papers still haven't gone through yet. His caseworker assures him that she's doing the best she can to get it done, but that it's hard because he'd acted out so much when he was younger, and that makes problems with adopting him for real. She's a tall, pointed woman who has been friends with his parents since long before she had been assigned to him. When she visits, she spends most of the time in the living room with them, speaking in a low, husky voice that splits into hawk-like screeches of laughter.

She doesn't visit often, and usually Bodhi likes it better that way.

“You make sure you do what you're told,” she'd said when he'd been dropped off first, nine years old and with a perpetual runny nose. “Be a good boy, alright? Do what you're asked.”

She smokes a lot. The smell of it always lingers after she's gone.

“Not everyone would take in a troublemaking child of your type, you know?” she'd said, gesturing vaguely to Bodhi's face, browner than any of the kids at his last foster home. “Kids like you usually just disappear. They're willing to see past all that though. Not everyone would. 'Specially round here.”

She'd patted him on the head, and he'd hated it.

No, he usually likes it better when she doesn't visit.

Bodhi stands outside his front door, stuck fast to the front stoop. He knows his parents aren't home, but he's so afraid that they'll somehow be there, and that he won't be able to stop from asking them. Asking them about what he heard, about the messages he sends. His father's face bleeds in front of his eyes, superimposed on the door in front of him. He longs all at once for the smell of smoke and the possibility of answers, escape.

A voice calls his name. Galen on the lawn across the way, in slacks and a sweater vest. He looks like a wholesome dad from a catalogue, and something in Bodhi's chest stills.

He calls back a greeting in response.

“Waiting for my daughter,” Galen says, answer to an unasked question. “I think she walks slower than you.”

Bodhi nods, at once desperate for Galen to keep talking and desperate to hide. He is not the kind of person to yell across roads. Once his mother had praised him for his ability to fly under the radar—called him her little pilot. He'd liked that.

“I've just made a pot of tea,” Galen says. “Would you like some?”

He's going to tell Galen that he's busy. That he has homework. That he doesn't like tea.

“Okay,” he says.

When he crosses the road, he hesitates for a moment in the centre, his feet planted on the yellow line marking the threshold between his side and the Erso's. Galen's turned to his door, trusting Bodhi to follow. His back is broad, and just looking at it makes Bodhi feel like a child again, doing what he's told.

“Coming?”

He comes.

****

He meets Galen's daughter in detention. Bodhi's got a fresh bruise high on his cheek, and she's got bloody knuckles—they look like two halves of the same story. She sits on the edge of her chair like she's ready to run, and holds her face and her body very tightly.

“What's that from?” she asks, nodding towards his face. They are not alone in the detention room, but by seemingly mutual agreement, they are both sat by the front, nearer to the teacher than the hulking boys at the back of the room.

Bodhi shrugs. “Got in a fight.”

She scoffs. “Looks like the fight got you.”

Only one of the boys who beat Bodhi up is also in detention. He was the one caught with his fist in Bodhi's collar when a teacher finally arrived. The others claimed they were trying to break up the fight.

“What about you?” he asks. “Where's your victim?”

It makes her laugh, and something about the laugh is familiar enough to ping his brain. He looks at her more carefully than before.

“I tripped,” she says, and it's so obviously false that Bodhi is laughing too, loud enough to drown out the idiots at the back.

She clocks him as her neighbour first, after he introduces himself. Apparently, Galen had told her about him. Bodhi is too surprised by that to repress the pleased warmth that spreads through his chest at the idea. His existence has never stuck in someone's mind past the minutes he's spent in their presence, and he'd expected it to be the same with Galen.

“You look like him,” he blurts. She raises an eyebrow, and the warmth becomes a blush, sickly on his cheeks. He blusters. “I mean, you have the same eyes, not that you like, look exactly like him, I just, I noticed his eyes.”

Noticed his eyes? Bodhi knows why he's the kind of kid that gets beaten up—it's 'cause he says weird shit like that. Luckily, she doesn't pursue it.

She does tell him that Galen works with Bodhi's parents.

“Yeah, he got brought on as a consultant for that business, that's why we've moved here,” she says, oblivious to the way Bodhi's world is slowly shrinking down upon him. “Some old friend of his—this guy called Krennic, he's like, the head of a big project for them—he needed my dad's help, 'cause he's apparently sort of a genius.”

There should not be a pit yawning open in Bodhi's stomach. Mr. Erso is just his neighbour, not his father, not anyone to him.

“You alright?”

Jyn has sharp eyes.

“Yeah,” Bodhi says. “Do you—do you know what he does there?”

She shrugs. “Balancing numbers for something, I think. I mean, what do your parents do?”

“I don't know,” Bodhi says. It comes out more truthfully than he meant it to. Even before Galen found him in a flowerbed, he hadn't really understood what the company his parents work for actually does. It's so massive that it seems to have departments in everything—stocks and retail and business and electronics and technology—too massive to tell what is the main focus. What is real and what isn't.

Jyn grunts. Past her shoulder, Bodhi can see a tall boy staring at them, sat apart from the other ones. He doesn't look away when Bodhi catches his eye, and Bodhi has the feeling that if he hadn't wanted to be seen, he wouldn't've been.

“Don't,” Jyn says sharply.

The boy has bloody knuckles too, and a face like a closed door. Bodhi imagines asking if he was who Jyn tripped over. It sounds witty and sure in his head, but he fumbles with it once it gets to his mouth, and he ends up just looking away.

In his peripheral vision, the boy slowly flexes his hand, and Bodhi feels the movement as if it were across his skin. He slumps down in his chair and scrubs at his eyes until the itch of them takes over from the buzz in his limbs.

Jyn is beautiful, and it's not her bloody fists he's thinking of. Her eyes, but not her eyes.

****

Galen tends a garden, and claims he's terrible at it and could use an extra hand. Galen has fifteen different kinds of tea, and has Bodhi try a new one every day. Galen has books with beautiful, intricate spreads of airplane schematics. Galen sometimes wears only a faded t-shirt and jeans, and everything about him radiates a steady sort of warmth. Bodhi stops thinking for a little bit in his kitchen, tea in hand.

His parents are never at home right after he's done school, so they won't know if he's not there.

He's still delivering their messages, and that's what they care about.

****

Bodhi and Jyn do not become friends, because neither of them seem to know how that kind of thing works. Something about hanging out with Jyn makes him uncomfortable—he hasn't mentioned that he has tea with her father every day after school, and not mentioning it feels conspicious. He spots her in the corners of hallways and the backs of classrooms, scowling and squaring up to people much bigger than her. His school has always had the feeling of a city under occupation by an invading army: teeming with barely supressed violence on all sides. Missing Persons posters have started popping up around the school, more than ever before, even for their city, and everyone has a group to blame. Jyn may be new, but it seems like she's got enemies in every group already.

The boy from detention who watched her so carefully is sometimes with her. There are lots of rumours about him, rumours that say his dad is FBI. He holds himself like a solider, a captain. Bodhi still hasn't figured out if he and Jyn are on the same side or not.

Bodhi asks Galen about it one afternoon over some weird, crumbly tea biscuits. Jyn is never home before he's left, but it doesn't seem to worry Galen.

“You just seem so chill,” Bodhi says. “She's the opposite of chill.”

Galen smiles slightly. When he looks down at his cup, his pale eyelashes make strange shapes against the darkness under his eyes.

“My Stardust has always been like that,” he says. “Her mother died when she was quite young, and I was unable to take care of her for a while, so she stayed with her Uncle Saw for many years. We've only been reunited recently. There is much to catch up on.”

It looks like it makes him sad to talk about, and sadness doesn't belong in this kitchen, bright still with afternoon sun coming in the windows. There are pictures of Jyn on the fridge, pinned with star magnets. She's smiling and tiny in one of them, perched on a younger Galen's knee.

“It's hard to talk to her,” Galen says. “I worry I'm not doing a good job.”

“I think you are,” Bodhi says. He may not have seen them together, but Galen talks about Jyn all the time. The love is painfully obvious. “I can vouch for you next time I see her in detention, if you want.”

“Do you end up in detention a lot?” he asks. “You don't strike me as the type to get into fights.”

Bodhi shrugs, and busies himself with his tea.

“What do your parents have to say about that?”

He does that sometimes: subtly brings up Bodhi's parents as though he knows something. It feels like being tested. Maybe Bodhi's just stupid, but in his experience, kind people are rare. He's weak to it. He should say nothing, but instead—

“Jyn should be happy,” he says. “She gets to have her Dad back again. I've never met mine.”

Galen sits back in his chair. “Were you young when you lost them?”

“I don't even remember them.”

“Your parents adopted you as a child.”

“No. Yes. It's not finalized. I was nine.”

“I wasn't aware the process was so long.”

“It's still being finalized.”

A pause. Bodhi jams a biscuit in his mouth.

“Jyn was seven when I first lost her.”

Bodhi looks up from the tabletop, and Galen's not looking at him anymore. He's looking at the pictures on the fridge, his face so open and wistful that Bodhi almost feels ashamed on his behalf. Adults are not meant to look that broken.

“Second chances come even to those who feel as though they do not deserve them,” Galen says. “That has been the most important realization of my life.”

The silence returns. Bodhi is suspended in the pale air of the kitchen, his eyes caught on the edge of Galen's jaw. He looks down when Galen turns back to him.

“Jyn said she told you that I work for the same business as them.”

Bodhi fixes his eyes on Galen's hands wrapped around his mug, and tries not to react.

“I think half the town does,” he mutters. He's heard some kids at school muttering that even the police work for them—it's something he knows he's not supposed to mention.

“That's true,” Galen says. “Of course, there's a lot of people who would rather see that business out of town.”

There's words printed on the mug, peeking out between his thick fingers. Bodhi strains to read it—strains to block out the image of his father crouching in front of him, hands on his shoulders, telling him how important it is that he doesn't tell anyone about the messages he runs. He'd called him sport again, called him their little pilot.

Maybe Galen knows he'd heard something, and is here to find out so he can shut him up. Maybe Galen is in on it all.

Galen draws in a breath, and Bodhi tenses like at school, waiting for the punch. But all Galen does is stand, and take his mug to the sink. He's in a button-down today, and it pulls across his shoulders as he rinses the cup. The sleeves are rolled up to just above the elbow, and water sticks to the hair on his forearms.

Maybe Bodhi heard nothing.

“I've got some peonies that I rescued from a coworker's office,” he says. “I thought we could settle them outside today.”

Bodhi's tea has gone cold.

“Okay,” he says.

****

Bodhi's parents don't actually know just how many fights he's been in, mostly because the teachers have stopped calling his house when he lands in detention. The first time he limped home with blood on his face, his mother sat him down and held his chin firmly in place while she carefully mopped him up. His head was a half-full fish bowl, everything sloshing around, and it felt like her hand on his face was the only thing keeping him from slopping out and open. It was only a couple of months ago—his usual bullies had been more careful with his face before then.

She didn't ask him who did it, but he offered anyway, terrified. He'd been jumped after passing on a package for his parents, by a group of scrappy-looking kids who usually were the ones fighting the real assholes at school. They'd asked him things about what he'd been doing, and if he knew where some people were, and he hadn't answered. His face had paid the price.

His mother had listened calmly, her face like stone.

“You didn't tell them anything?” she said.

“No,” he said. “I swear, Mom, I didn't, I didn't say anything.”

She pressed the cold cloth back to his cheek, and it felt so good he let his eyes drift shut under the relief of it.

“You're a good boy,” she said. “But do not get yourself into that kind of situation again. You know we're counting on you not to slip up.”

“I know.”

“I do not want to see you like this again, do you understand?”

“Yes, Mom.”

He knew she had only been worried for him, but it didn't stop him from being scared to go home the next time a fist caught him somewhere visible. He'd ended up shivering under a CLOSED sign on the doorstep of a tiny incense store, sandwiched in between two different “MISSING” posters for girls his age. He was two blocks away from school. It had been a regular fight this time—Bodhi being the obvious target he was—but his mother would assume the worst, and think that he'd let her down again. He was supposed to not be seen when he was delivering messages. For so long, he'd been good at it, and then he'd gotten taller and more visibly awkward and started looking at the wrong people the wrong way, and being completely invisible started to get harder.

He'd stood there on the shop step for maybe ten minutes before the door against his back was yanked open, and a man in a red sash told him to come inside before he froze to death.

Chirrut and Baze have been patching him up ever since then.

He's in a rush when he ducks into their shop on Friday. It's been a little over a week since Galen moved across the road, and Bodhi hasn't been late to meet him after school yet, but the base of his throat was scraped by someone's ring, and it's still bleeding sluggishly. He'd had the bad luck to stumble into the tail end of a fight that didn't even involve him. Jyn was at the centre, her teeth bared, and she'd put herself between him and his assailant as soon as she caught sight of Bodhi. There are more fights these days—the school, the city, all tilting back and forth in her hand.

The shop is dark inside, dim light from the windows catching on the myriad of crystals hanging from the ceilings. No matter how still the air is, they're always moving slightly, as though stirred by an unfelt breeze. It's warm.

Chirrut pops his head out from the curtain behind the desk, and smiles.

“You used your key!” he says. He looks a little flushed.

“I could've just been someone breaking in,” Bodhi says. “How do you always know?”

Baze appears behind Chirrut, pushing forward with a frown on his face. Where Chirrut is cropped hair and sleek muscles, Baze is a lion of a man, both in the thickness of his hair and his frame.

“He can smell foolishness,” Baze says curtly. “Come. That'll need some bactine.”

There's a couch by the back that Bodhi is becoming very familiar with, and he obediantly sits down and tilts his head so Baze can get at the wound. Chirrut hovers, his face pointed towards the windows, and banters with Baze about something that doesn't involve Bodhi. Bodhi drifts, feeling only Baze's careful touch and the coolness of the lotion.

Baze has what looks like a hickey on his neck, large and livid, like it's fresh. Not for the first time, Bodhi wants to ask what Chirrut had meant when he'd introduced them as partners. Did he mean something other than business?

The concept of it makes Bodhi feel uncomfortable in his own skin, and he has to fight suddenly to not twitch away from Baze.

Baze seems to feel it anyway, and draws back quickly, patting a bandage down over Bodhi's collarbone.

“Your shirt should cover it,” he says.

“Have I mentioned that this couch can be pulled out to a bed?” Chirrut says. “It's a shame it's not getting used.”

Bodhi gets to his feet and selfconsciously pulls the neck of his shirt up. There is something soft about the atmosphere of this shop that never seems to be open, something in the crystals and the heaps of muted red cloth stacked everywhere. He feels more comfortable here than makes sense, considering how little he knows about its owners. It reminds him, in some distant, imagined way, of how it felt to be held by his mother—his real one.

“Thank you,” Bodhi says. “I have to get home.”

He tries to hand the shop key back to Baze, who simply looks at Bodhi's hand.

“If Chirrut wants you to have that, I'm not taking it from you,” Baze says.

“It takes a lot of energy to unlock that door,” Chirrut says. “Are you trying to make an old, blind man work more?”

“You are not old,” Baze says.

“It's true, I'm a spring chicken compared to you,” Chirrut says.

“I could be anyone,” Bodhi says. “I could rob you guys.”

“A boy who finds himself being used as a punching bag every other day of the week?” Baze says sharply.

“Hey, I've still got—I could still do stuff,” Bodhi says.

“You are much braver than you know,” Chirrut says. “But you are no danger to us, or anyone who is following the right path.”

Chirrut is a mystery to Bodhi, and has been since he put an icepack to Bodhi's face and gave him a key to their shop. Every time Bodhi steps foot in this shop, he never knows what he's doing here.

“Okay,” he says, and pockets the key.

It's different with them than with Galen. He's told Galen more stuff in one week than he's ever been able to tell Chirrut and Baze. Bodhi can't put his finger on it, but it's something in the way they angle towards each other no matter where they're standing. Being near that hurts a little, in some strange way. Bodhi's parents don't do that with each other or with him. He's never felt that kind of glow.

Chirrut and Baze are a closed circuit, and there's no space for him.

He looks back at the shop when he reaches the corner, and the windows are dark, opaque. The letters of the sign above look like they've been there for hundreds of years, like they're made of stone instead of wood: JEDHA KYBER TEMPLE.

A shiver goes through him. He's going to be late. He turns, the bandage pulling at his chest like a reminder.

****

He's been in Galen's garden too long.

He should have gone home an hour ago, but Galen has dirt streaked on his forehead, and there are living things cupped between his hands. Bodhi's forgotten the name of this plant, but it's large and leafy green, and they're moving it from the side of the house to the front, where it has more space.

The other day, a new type of plane was invented, and Bodhi had learned about it in science class. A plane that they think could be able to cruise up by the International Space Station—one step closer to actual, proper space travel.

“Imagine getting to fly it,” he says, patting dirt down with his trowel. “Getting to go from the ground to space.”

“I used to fly a lot when I was younger,” Galen says. “Only as a passenger. Never brave enough to be the pilot. I imagine it would be a lot of weight on your shoulders, all those lives.”

“Well, I wouldn't want to fly a passenger jet,” Bodhi says. “But I think it would be worth it—even if it was just cargo I was flying, just to feel that.”

“To escape,” Galen says.

He's looking at Bodhi when he says it, and Bodhi accidentally catches his eye. He's very aware of the sheltered huddle of their bodies over the bush, shoulders curved close together.

“I guess,” he says. “I mean, no? Not really. I just—I like to be useful. I'd be more useful if I could fly.”

“You wouldn't want to fly for fun?”

“I don't know,” Bodhi says. “I don't do many things for fun.”

“You sound like my Jyn,” Galen says, and his grin falls slightly. “There's no room for kids to have fun here is there? You just keep getting drawn into the wars of your parents.”

The soft, wide leaves of the plant brush the back of Bodhi's hand. His wrist brushes Galen's. He reminds himself again that Galen works for the same business as his parents—that there are things he can't say, even with the words bubbling at the back of his throat.

“Do you ever feel like that, Bodhi?”

Galen looks almost sad. Almost like Bodhi's own father at the end of the day, hunched sunken in the armchair in the corner of their living room, watching tv with his hand open, waiting for Bodhi to get him a beer.

“Dad?”

He had barely looked up when Bodhi called him. Bodhi's sixteen, fifteen, thirteen, eleven, nine, dialing down, dialing back, on the steps of the group home, getting into the car of the woman who said she was his new caseworker. Standing in the living room and testing out a new word on his tongue.

“Dad, can I go outside for a bit?”

He'd grunted, and asked where his beer was, and that was the end of that. Bodhi had learned what parents meant with his head in the fridge and an envelope in hand—parents meant a cause to follow. Love meant being useful. Not having fun.

Bodhi's mother and father had been angry last night, muttering something about cargo, about someone getting sloppy, careless, about journalists and government lackeys poking around. He'd been too afraid that he might hear something more through their bedroom door, and he'd curled up on his own bed, hands over his ears, telling himself over and over that he didn't know what he'd heard. That he'd just gotten confused.

Dirt peppers his cheek, and Bodhi blinks back into Galen's garden. His knees are damp, and his shoulder burns when Galen nudges him. There's flecks of dirt on Galen's fingers: he'd thrown some at Bodhi's face.

“Thought I'd lost you,” Galen says. “Still with me?”

Bodhi sinks his hand into the earth, and then, quick enough to leave his doubts behind, he flings a palmful up at Galen. It hits him on the chin, and Galen laughs. It always sounds strange coming out of him. For all the peace Bodhi feels in his presence, Galen's face looks remarkably drawn most of the time. The change of his face when he's smiling—it pulls Bodhi headfirst into a laugh as well, bottomless.

“Hey, enough of that!” Galen says, rubbing his hand over his jaw.

“You started it,” Bodhi shoots back.

“Good point,” Galen says. “I should not have. We're trying to provide a good home to these plants here. They need a good foundation.”

Bodhi looks worriedly at the bush, a few of its roots showing where he'd scooped away the topsoil.

“It's not going to grow all wrong, is it?”

“No, this is a tough one. This is my third time moving it, and it's always bounced back. Sometimes it takes a while to find the right spot for a plant to thrive.”

He picks up the trowel Bodhi had abandoned and hands it back to him.

“Plants can't just fly away, unfortunately. They need a little help.”

Bodhi takes the trowel.

“I have fun here,” he says quietly.

Galen smiles. He still looks sad.

****

Bodhi knows he gets confused a lot.

There's a group of kids at school that everybody knows as the Partisans, and ever since they caught Bodhi with a message those few months back, they like giving Bodhi what they call a “Bor Gullet”. It involves Bodhi on his knees in a bathroom cubicle, someone holding him down and someone else slamming their hand on the lever to flush. Water swirling and pounding in his ears, flooding his mouth and his nose—it takes him a bit to remember who he is afterwards, gasping slack-mouthed against a curse scrawled on the side of the stall.

It's not that he never fights back, but he's more suited for flight than anything else. He still tries every time; his brain knows that it's pointless, but something in him refuses to submit and just let it happen. He flails and squirms, and sometimes gets in a hit—one glorious moment of power.

The Bor Gullet makes him weak though. Confused.

He doesn't think he's been quite the same since the first time he got one. Maybe it jiggled something loose, and now nothing about him is the same. His hearing. His memory. He gets confused a lot.

On a Wednesday, he walks in on Jyn's captain pressing her into the wall with his hips and his mouth, and three hours later, the same boy is pulling his head up out of a toilet.

The first thing is more of a surprise: Jyn and the tall boy ducked carefully together in the base of a stairwell, her face cupped in his hands, shockingly gentle. Bodhi had stayed still at the corner when he saw them, afraid to move and break their moment. It was two sharp people made soft against each other—Bodhi had the strange feeling that he'd walked into a theatre at the climax of a movie he'd only seen snatches of before. He couldn't breathe, watching the boy's hands make a mess of Jyn's bun, watching Jyn's closed eyes flicker, earnestly, desperately tight at the corners. She kissed hard enough to rock the boy back on his heels, and they clutched and swayed, point and counterpoint. An open space of longing yawned open in Bodhi's chest, and when it became clear that the two would not stop, maybe could not, he found his feet and ran back down the way he came, his former path forgotten.

The image of it follows him, staining, like an oil slick he's stumbled into and can't help tracking around. It's at the end of the day that his distraction costs him, and he's grabbed while coming out of the bathroom.

That's where Jyn's captain finds him. Bodhi's choking and thrashing, halfway to insanity on the cold tiles, and suddenly the pressure disappears from the back of his neck. Something pulls him out of the water into a shattered soundscape of voices and scuffling sounds, and then that touch is gone too. He pants over the bowl of the toilet. A face he does not recognize shivers beneath.

He comes back to himself at a cold hand on his cheek, and flinches away.

“Hey,” says the boy. He's crouching, sweaty hair falling over his forehead. “S'okay. I'm not with them.”

It takes Bodhi a long moment to place him. At first all he can register is that the boy is beautiful, dangerously so, the thought swollen huge in his head.

“I'm Cassian,” the boy says, the one who watches people from the edges of rooms and who stands too close to Jyn and who kissed her in the stairwell. Bodhi wonders how much the last two facts have to do with this inexplicable rescue; Bodhi and Jyn still sit together whenever they're in detention. The boy's eyes are just as intense up close, and his expression is impossible to read. He certainly looks like the son of an FBI agent. “You're not the usual kind they go after.”

It sounds vaguely accusatory, and Bodhi floods with panic suddenly—Cassian, and occasionally Jyn, usually hang out with a group of kids who sometimes also hang out with the Partisans. They all seem to hate the same people, and Bodhi is not one of those people. He's just lost in the middle.

“I'm not,” he says. “My name is Bodhi, I'm just—I'm the pilot.”

Cassian nods, as if any of that made sense. There is no mark on him to show that he fought anyone, but he's holding his hands carefully. Bodhi can't quite look away from those hands. One of them had touched him on the cheek, had wrapped in his hair to pull him up, so close to how he'd touched Jyn.

“Next time,” Cassian says. “Jab the tall one in the armpit. Takes him down in one second flat. Better yet—don't give them a reason to look at you.”

Bodhi nods, shocked that Cassian's still talking to him, bent so close and so warm. He can't stand it.

It ends with a crackling, robotic voice coming out of a strange box poking out of Cassian's pocket, and him snapping up and away like he's been called to duty. Bodhi stays where he is on the bathroom floor, the seat of his pants growing slowly wet. He's sitting in a puddle. His belly is warm, a thick sort of pressure.

He gets confused a lot, especially about the things he wants.

****

He delivers an envelope to a boy on the south side of the city—the contacts who receive his messages are almost always other boys his age—and stops at Chirrut and Baze's to ask for some water before he heads home. It's later than usual. Even as the sky dips itself in ink, the heat of the day does not abate, and by the time he finally turns onto his own street, his clothes are a sticky second skin.

He's automatically heading across the street to Galen's house when he sees Jyn through the front window and draws up short in the middle of the road.

Knowing that Jyn is Galen's daughter is different than seeing them together, and for some reason it feels like a leash tightening around his neck, pulling him away. Galen and Jyn are standing in the living room, talking about something together, and they move their hands in the same way. Jyn's hair is down, which it never is. They look like they're arguing, but that doesn't matter, because it just makes them look more alike.

The pictures on Galen's fridge aren't just abstract anymore—Galen and Jyn are their own closed circuit, and Bodhi's sweating against the pavement, alone.

“Bodhi!”

For one dizzy second, he doesn't recognize the voice. The second time it calls, deafeningly loud, he turns, and sees his father standing in the doorway of their house. He looks thunderous—Bodhi can see the bad mood coming off of him like smoke.

“You're late,” he snaps. “Where have you been?”

Bodhi opens his mouth to answer, and a voice calls from the other side of the road.

“He's just been helping me out.”

Galen is leaning casually in his open door, Jyn just visible over his shoulder. Bodhi's gut clenches.

“Bodhi's been good enough to give me a hand with my garden after school since we moved here,” Galen continues. “Sorry I kept him a bit long today.”

“I didn't see the two of you in that garden earlier,” Bodhi's father says. Neither man has moved off of their respective front stoops, so their voices meet loudly in middle of the road.

“There's another one out back,” Galen says.

He isn't looking at Bodhi at all, his eyes fixed on Bodhi's father. Jyn makes eye contact, but Bodhi can't read what's in her face. She's carrying a mug that he recognizes as the one Galen used the day he told Bodhi he had once lost her. At this distance, the writing is still unreadable.

Bodhi's father blows out a breath and marches down the front walkway, leaving the screen door flapping behind him. As if he was waiting for it, Galen moves too, and Bodhi is stuck fast to the pavement, watching both of them approach, twin tidal waves. He can barely keep his head above the water.

His father grabs his arm, and oh. He's drunk. Bodhi can tell at this range. His father doesn't get violent or anything when he's drunk, just kind of surly, but Bodhi hates that Galen is almost upon them, that Galen's going to see his dad like this. When his dad pulls, he goes with him easily; maybe Galen will just go back to his front door, and his daughter, and his warm, golden lit house.

“I don't think we've properly met,” Galen says loudly, too close. Bodhi's father turns, a sneer starting in the corner of his mouth. “I'm Galen Erso.”

Bodhi's father draws up short, and lets Bodhi go. Heat rushes to the surface of his skin.

“Galen Erso?” his father says, and he sounds much different now. “Director Krennic's Erso?”

Galen gives a tight, thin-lipped smile. He looks like a snake suddenly, unrecognizable.

“The very same,” he says. “Your son's been very helpful to me.”

“My son?” Bodhi's father says. “Oh, yes, your...gardening.” He laughs, like there's a joke only he and Galen are in on. “He's an excellent messenger, and very loyal. Best little pilot I could ask for.”

He claps a hand on Bohid's shoulder and shakes him slightly. It's the kind of contact that Bodhi would have killed for a month ago, the kind of praise he'd have felt like sun under his skin. Now he feels nothing but a prickling uncomfortableness. He wants his father to remove his hand.

He doesn't.

“My wife and I are happy to lend him out anytime you need something delivered.”

“His gardening skills are all I need,” Galen says firmly.

“Oh, of course. And the name's Rook, in case the boy hasn't told you. If you could put in a good word...after all, if Bodhi's been so helpful—”

“Certainly.”

Jyn's on the sidewalk, not even trying to pretend she's not listening. She's close enough that Bodhi can finally see the words printed on the mug still in her hands: “Rebellions Are Built On Hope”. Bodhi goes very still inside. She sees him looking, and adjusts her grip to cover the words completely. Her face is blank and his brain is going a million miles per second.

He thinks of the blood on her knuckles, and the image in his head turns into those knuckles on Cassian's face, smearing red down his cheek to his mouth, like paint, or lipstick.

Headlights rush across the pavement—a car approaching. It idles as Jyn and Bodhi's fathers finish talking, and when they split apart, it rushes into the space in between. Bodhi's father keeps his hand on his shoulder, tugging him towards their house. When he looks back, he can barely see Galen and Jyn through the cloud of smoke the car left behind. They're side by side, watching Bodhi be lead away.

Once inside, his father yells at him for not telling him that he'd made a connection with Galen Erso. He comes across as pleased though, not angry. Bodhi sits silently and watches his father flush and grin and grumble. He seems more alien than ever, changing, which is strange, because he's not even acting any different. If anything, he's paying more attention to Bodhi than usual, but Bodhi is somewhere other than in that room, somewhere above and looking down at it all.

Is this what he's been wanting all this time, running after his parents' backs and running errands for them, and waiting for a hand on his head?

Very loyal, his father had said. Best pilot around.

In his head, he's on his knees in a flowerbed again, but he doesn't know who owns it.

****

That night, Bodhi dreams he's in a stairwell, pressed up against Jyn. His eyes are open, and hers are closed, and he desperately wants to see them. They're kissing, and he feels like he's getting lost in her mouth, in her rough touch. He closes his eyes, awkward and empty.

There's a wall against his back suddenly, and hands on his face. A thumb drags over his bottom lip, heavy. He opens his eyes, and it's Cassian in front of him. Bodhi doesn't have time to do anything before he's being kissed again, heat rushing out crazily from the contact. There's blood on his cheek and warmth all down his front because Cassian's pressing him into the wall, pushing into him until he can barely breathe.

He wants, he wants, he wants—

“Bodhi,” Cassian says, except it's not his voice.

Galen is smiling down at him with light glowing around his head; when he sinks forward, he blots out the light completely. In the dark, he places his mouth over Bodhi's, soft and firm.

Galen tastes like tea, and touches like Bodhi is something he's been waiting too long for to be completely careful. Bodhi's a skinny, awkward, useless teenage thing next to Galen, who seems old suddenly in a way that has everything to do with experience and nothing to do with weakness. His hand on Bodhi's stomach makes Bodhi feel like his skin's going to come off, like he's going to shake out of himself. Bodhi's breath is stupidly loud against Galen's cheek; every time Galen pulls out of the kiss, Bodhi can't help but search for his mouth again, needing to silence himself. In real life, he's never been kissed, but that doesn't seem to matter here. He's made new, made older with the sick, hot thrill of Galen's tongue rubbing in a slick roll against his own, Galen's thumb working a bruise into the hinge of his jaw, Galen's fingers hooking into the waistband of his jeans. He is crushed and covered by Galen, so surrounded that there is no part of him that can't feel Galen's warmth.

It's a dream, so the floor doesn't hurt his knees. Galen cups the back of his head in one hand, smoothing soft through Bodhi's hair. He calls him “son”, and Bodhi goes without air gladly. He's flying high in the sky, useful. He's reaching space.

Bodhi wakes with his boxers stuck to his thigh and a tight, curling feeling of unease in his stomach. He stares at the crack in his ceiling above his bed, heart pounding, until his mother calls for him.

****

Jyn sits next to him in detention again. He'd half expected her not to. Cassian is two rows behind them, and Bodhi sees it now not as him spying on them, but positioning himself between them and the bullies at the back. He taps patterns on the same tiny box that spoke to him before, and watches them.

Bodhi doesn't know how to look at Jyn or Cassian properly right now.

“Did my Dad tell you I was almost kidnapped once?”

She's serious. Bodhi shakes his head.

“My Uncle Saw,” she says, and the way she says “uncle” makes it clear how fitting she thinks that moniker is—“left me outside an orphanage when I was thirteen, because apparently he thought it was getting too dangerous for me to stay with him cause of what he did.”

She's looking straight forward at the blackboard, seemingly unconcerned. One hand fiddles with the crystal necklace around her neck. Bodhi's never seen her without it.

“Someone in a car tried to tell me that they were my new caseworker, and that I should go with them. I told them I wasn't a foster kid, and they tried to take me anyway.”

There's a high-pitched hum somewhere in the room, faint, like a kettle slowly coming to boil. It feels like it's happening between Bodhi's ears.

“I got away.”

They're adopting me, Bodhi wants to yell. You don't know what you're talking about. But the words wouldn't make sense to her, don't even make sense to him, because there's no connection, he's just getting confused again, finding patterns where there is none, hearing things wrong—

“I thought my Dad was worse than Saw,” Jyn says. “Just like Krennic. But I'm starting to think that maybe I was wrong.”

Her voice cracks, and Bodhi can't tell if it's calculated or not. She shrugs. She wants something from him, but Bodhi's hands are empty, no package to deliver. He pictures her own hands around a mug, and wonders who owns it: her, or Galen.

“He doesn't tell me anything,” she says. “I didn't know he spent all this time with you.”

“It's just gardening, not anything important,” Bodhi says, which isn't true at all. Their conversations have been more important to him than anything has for a long time.

Jyn doesn't say anything for a while. Her jaw is stiff. She doesn't look bitter, exactly, but if there's one thing he's learned about her in these few weeks it's that she's good at hiding things.

“What do your parents do at work?” Jyn asks finally.

“I don't know,” Bodhi says. “What does Galen do?”

“I don't know,” she says.

The exchange is stale, but somehow different than the first time. Bodhi's hands feel full suddenly.

“Whatever it is, it's not what my parents do,” Bodhi says slowly, and somehow he finds that he believes it. “He's good, Jyn. He loves you.”

It feels like letting something precious go, like losing the warmth of a candle in order to pass it on. Jyn's chin wobbles, but she nods. Her shoulders grow looser. Behind them, Cassian taps away on his robot, and Jyn's leg jiggles under the desk to the same rhythm.

Bodhi can't keep up with it.

****

He cries in the toilets at lunch break, legs curled up so no one outside the stall can see him. It wells up out of him like a scream, or vomit, and he doesn't know why he's crying exactly, just that his parents say goodbye every morning with the same voice, and he'd felt so warm in his dream, and Jyn and Cassian looked so consumed in each other in that stairwell, consumed like Chirrut and Baze, consumed in a way Bodhi's never had. Loneliness squeezes around his lungs like a terrible fist. He's sitting on top of what other kids use to scramble his brain, and that's it right there—even when he's breaking down, he has nowhere to go where this confusion doesn't follow.

The only thing that's clear in his head is Galen's face, smiling with dirt high on the side of his cheek. He doesn't know what that means.

****

“Why did you help me on that first day? Really?”

Chirrut is quiet, standing alone in the doorway of his shop, Baze presumably not far behind him. There's no quips from him now.

“This city used to feel holy,” he says at length. “It used to draw pilgrimages. People would come to this store for crystals that can not be found anywhere else. But things changed. Corporations and police change things, and this place has lost its power.”

The shop windows are dark. They're always dark.

“It's strange times when seeing less children living on the streets is a sign for concern and not celebration,” Chirrut says. “Things are more dangerous than they should be. If we have the chance to help protect one strong heart left in this city, we will.”

Baze appears soundlessly at Chirrut's shoulder, and Chirrut instantly leans into him, as if he could just sense his presence there. For a split second, Bodhi hates them both, so settled with each other, as if it's easy to be that way, as if it's fine.

“Come in,” Chirrut says. “The couch is getting dusty.”

“I can't stay,” Bodhi says. “I need to leave, I need to go.”

“Perhaps you should be asking yourself why it is you needed our help,” Chirrut says. “And why you keep returning.”

Baze reaches out as though he's going for a consoling pat on the shoulder, and Bodhi recoils violently, surprising even himself.

“Don't touch me,” he snaps. “You're both—weird, you know, you're, you're—don't touch me.”

Baze looks thunderous, and for a moment, Bodhi is afraid of him. Chirrut fumbles for Baze's hand, and strokes his thumb over the hard spine of Baze's fingers, soothing. Neither of them look angry then; just sad.

Bodhi doesn't deserve their sadness.

“I'm sorry,” he says. “I need to go.”

He'd seen Jyn going into the shop the last time he'd come to visit. He'd stayed on the sidewalk, standing off balance with a bleeding knee, and stared for a long moment before walking away. There is no scrap of comfort he has that he does not share with her. There is nothing of his own.

****

“I can't.”

His mother blinks at him, her coat hanging half on, half off. One sleeve trails on the ground. His father had left early, and it's only her and Bodhi left. Bodhi shoves the envelope back at her, his hand shaking.

“I can't do it today.”

She stares down at the envelope like she doesn't recognize it, and then looks slowly up at Bodhi. Sometime in the last couple of years, Bodhi has become taller than her. He never feels it, especially not when she has that look on her face.

“Bodhi, you know your father and I rely on you delivering these.”

“I always thought it was about drugs,” Bodhi says. “That's what I figured it had to be. I didn't care.”

“Did you read any of the messages?”

He doesn't answer fast enough, and her hand snaps out, grasping the edge of his chin and pulling him down to her height. Her eyes are rabbit round and black.

“Did you read them.”

“No,” Bodhi says. “I didn't, Mom, you just sometimes say the word “cargo” to Dad, I just figured, I just, I'm just—I don't feel well. I don't think I can do to school today. Can't you deliver it?”

She lets him go, but he stays hunched, too yanked out of shape to go back to how he was.

“We've been over this before,” she says. “You can get places that your father and I cannot. Some things can't go by email because we don't want to leave a digital trace. It does not reflect well on the company if visible members such as your father and I were seen traipsing around the city bringing unwanted attention to our comings and goings. Bodhi, we need you.”

It's like a hook in his stomach, trying to pull him back in. He steels himself.

“I'm too sick,” he says. “Not today, I feel really nauseous. If you make me go, I'll just come right home.”

“You wouldn't even have a home if it weren't for us,” she hisses. “Do you understand how ungrateful you are acting? You don't know what we have done for you. You were meant to end up like the rest of them, and we decided to take you in. We ask for so little in return. So little.”

“I can't,” Bodhi says, and maybe he's just a really good actor, but he's starting to actually feel sick, heat waves shuddering out through his body. He drags a hand over his face to knuckle into his eyes, and coughs. His mother steps back. “I just can't.”

There's a beep, and his mother pulls out a small cube similar to Cassian's. She checks something on it and swears under her breath.

“Alright,” she says. “You do not have to go to school. You can stay here until you feel better, but you are still to deliver that message at 3pm. Do you understand me.”

“Yes,” Bodhi says.

“Don't let anyone follow you back here, and remember, do not mention me or your father if anyone questions you.”

“I remember.”

“You do not want to know the consequences you will face if I return this evening and you have stayed under my roof all day without doing what you were told.”

Bodhi doesn't have words anymore, so he just nods. His throat is thick. His mother regards him for a moment longer, and then finishes putting on her coat. She smiles, and for a split second, it's like Bodhi can't feel the press of her fingers on his chin still.

“Medicine's on the top shelf in the bathroom,” she says. “Be good. Feel better.”

Bodhi stands in the hallway for a long time after she's left. His shoes are still on the shoe rack where he left them last night, one of them knocked over so he can see inside to where the fabric of the sole is peeling away like loose skin. He's come through this front door countless times, stood under the weak light of the wall socket lamps with rain and snow and sun and sadness on his shoulders. He's been in this house and under this roof for enough years that he'd started considering it his own.

It's not the first mistake he's made. He is built on mistakes.

****

He ends up outside Galen's house with his father's hockey bag on his shoulder; he doesn't have luggage of his own. By the time he remembers that Galen will probably be at work, he's already pressed the doorbell. It echoes inside the house, cheerful.

The door opens, and somehow Galen's there in front of him, looking concerned and more beautiful than anyone Bodhi's ever known. Bodhi almost starts crying at the sight of him, manifested here against all odds just when Bodhi needs him.

“Bodhi?” Galen says. “Shouldn't you be at school?”

“They don't care about me, do they?” Bodhi says.

Galen brings him inside.

In the hallway so like Bodhi's own, Galen puts his hands on Bodhi's shoulders and rubs his thumbs in circles, soothing, like Chirrut had with Baze. The touch only keys Bodhi up more. He's not breathing quite right.

“I don't think my Mom and Dad love me anymore,” Bodhi says. He drops the bag on the floor. Every word feels wet and round. “I don't know if they ever did.”

“Oh,” Galen says softly. “Bodhi.”

He steps forward, and for a second it's Bodhi's dream all over again, sense memory drawing a rush of heat up from his toes. The hall light is blocked out by Galen's shoulder. Bodhi closes his eyes.

It's a hug instead, and that's almost as good, Galen's arms tight around him, his scruffy cheek pressed up against Bodhi's neck. Bodhi goes a little limp and a little clingy all at once, just trying to not lose it with his nose shoved into Galen's warm shoulder. He takes fistfuls of fabric on Galen's back, and Galen holds him while he breathes. This is what it's supposed to be like, a small voice in his head says. This is it.

“You can find help, Bodhi,” Galen says, quiet and certain in his ear. “There is nothing brave about blind obedience, or suffering in silence. If you want to know the truth, you only have to ask.”

“You don't really want to work for Krennic,” Bodhi says.

“No.”

“My parents make me deliver stuff so I can be a scapegoat if it gets caught.”

“Yes.”

“The cargo I've heard them mention. It's not drugs.”

“No.”

Bodhi takes a deep, shuddering breath, Galen's shirt gone damp and hot under his mouth.

“It's people, isn't it,” he says.

His parents, laughing in his house, thinking Bodhi was elsewhere. Younger sells better, they'd said. Younger is easier to control. Go for the ones no one will miss.

Galen nods, and the simple movement against Bodhi's head makes him come undone. He's getting saliva and tears and snot all over Galen's shoulder, clutching and clutching, and still Galen, for some reason, is holding him.

“I'm a bad person,” Bodhi hiccups, and Galen squeezes him tighter.

“No,” he says. “Bodhi, you are not.”

He pulls away, and if it were not for his hands still on Bodhi's shoulders, Bodhi knows he would topple over. He sets his eyes greedily on Galen's face above his, the only fixed point in his world. He looks nothing like Bodhi's father right now, and everything like him.

“You can get out from under their control, get right by yourself,” Galen says. “You just have to be brave enough and listen to what's in your heart.”

His hands shift, tectonic plates rearranging Bodhi's entire topography. One settles over Bodhi's chest, where his pulse is racing. The other smoothes carefully, affectionately, over the top of Bodhi's head. An unseen dam breaks, and Bodhi spills.

He surges forward onto his tiptoes, and kisses Galen.

Relief and adrenaline explode hot in his chest, the unstoppable momentum of heartbreak smashing him forward into the softness of Galen's mouth, half-open, unprotected. He catches himself on Galen's arms; they twist under his hands. Bodhi gets a sliver of the wet inside of Galen's lip dragging up across his, almost like intent, and it's good, it's good, it's better than Bodhi has ever deserved—and then those arms are escaping his palms, and he's being urged backwards.

Galen does it gently, the way he might try to handle a dog who had pulled too hard at the lead. It's worse, somehow, than if he'd shoved Bodhi off. He holds Bodhi at arm's length, and refuses to let him jerk away.

“Bodhi,” Galen says, and Bodhi makes a choked sound, desperately wanting to drown out whatever Galen might say. He wants to go back to when Galen was hugging him and he hadn't made a fool of himself yet. He wants to go back to kissing Galen and believing for one second that Galen might kiss back.

“Bodhi,” Galen persists. “I can't be that for you.”

Bodhi's mouth is cold. He's cold all down his front, where Galen is no longer pressed against him.

“You could be if you wanted to,” Bodhi says. “I could be good for it, for you.”

Galen's face crumples a little. There's some of Bodhi's spit on his bottom lip still.

“You don't need to be good for anyone but yourself,” he says. “Did your parents—”

“No,” Bodhi says. “No one fucked me up this way, I did that all myself.”

“That's not true,” Galen says. “The things you want are not fucked up just because you chose someone who cannot reciprocate. This doesn't make you bad.”

“I just—I just wanted—”

Someone to love me, he thinks, but even thinking it makes him feel like he's curdling with shame, so he lets it drop off. He thinks Galen knows anyway: his face is becoming more drawn by the second. He looks like he's seen more of life than he'd wanted to. He looks old.

Bodhi looks away from him, and down at the floor. The strap of the hockey bag is trapped under his left foot, setting his whole body off balance. Everything he owns is in that bag, and he's never felt more stupid.

“I'm sorry.”

He doesn't know which of them says it. It doesn't matter.

“If I was older,” he says, and then stops.

“You wouldn't care one bit for a man like me,” Galen says.

“I would.”

Galen smiles, and it's not unkind, but it's so different from what Bodhi has seen on his face before that he feels thrown suddenly. Maybe it's the lighting. Maybe it's the time of day. He's never seen Galen like this before. Kissed and unfamiliar. It's distracting. Disconcerting

“You'll be someone else when you're older, Bodhi,” Galen says. “All you can do is concentrate on making it through who you are right now.”

“Being someone else sounds better than being this.”

“I like the Bodhi I know. I like who you are right now.”

“Not enough,” Bodhi says. “Nobody ever tells me the truth—if you liked me you'd prove it, you'd let me do this, you'd make use of me—”

His hands are at Galen's belt suddenly; Galen's stomach sucks in away from the touch of Bodhi's stubby knuckles, but for a moment he doesn't stop it. One of Bodhi's fingers slips under the waistband of Galen's jeans, finding skin and the scratch of hair leading down, and it's paralyzing and intoxicating because Bodhi's got no hair on his own chest or stomach, not like this—and the threat of what success would look like swells up like a monster breathing down Bodhi's neck. He freezes, hands held awkwardly between them, and looks back up at Galen's face.

For a split second, he can't read the expression he finds there. Bodhi's aware of his own clumsy hands and the growing heaviness in his own jeans, of the cold space between him and Galen that's spreading into his chest. He realizes that he'd been expecting Galen to stop him. Counting on it.

One of Galen's hands reaches belatedly for Bodhi's wrist, and he yanks his hands back himself, tugging the hem of his shirt down over his crotch. The finger that touched Galen's skin feels like it's burning. The hallway doubles in his head, two options branching out; Galen grabbing Bodhi's wrist to press his hand more firmly against the front of his pants: Galen grabbing his wrist in order to remove Bodhi's hands from him. Bodhi's mouth feels like it's coated in chalk. He has no idea which option would have been worse.

“I'm sorry.” It's Bodhi for sure this time. His voice sounds strange. “I shouldn't've done that.”

“No,” says Galen. “You should not.”

“I'm sorry.”

He flinches when a hand lands on his shoulder, but all Galen does is slowly rub his thumb back and forth across Bodhi's shirt. The monster at Bodhi's neck begins to shrink down.

“I'm going to make us some tea,” Galen says. “Would you like that?”

Bodhi blinks.

“Yes.”

****

It should be monumentally strange: sitting across from Galen at the kitchen table after Bodhi threw himself at him. Galen sits with his legs crossed, looking off through the living room windows at the garden spread out on the front lawn. Bodhi sips at the dregs of his tea and watches a strip of sun slide up the side of Galen's cup. The tea has washed away what was left of Galen's mouth on his, and his tongue tastes familiar again.

Bodhi had chosen Jyn's Rebellion mug from the cupboard while Galen was turning on the kettle. They'd puttered about the kitchen in silence together, in step like family, like Bodhi belonged here. They sit now as if it were any other day, and any moment they could go out into the garden and lose themselves in the dirt.

“I can't stay here, can I,” Bodhi says, setting down his mug.

Galen shakes his head.

“I'm right across the road from your parents,” he says. “And what I'm working on—it's too dangerous to bring anyone else closer. It's all I can do to try and keep Jyn out of it.”

“I think she'd rather fight, if there was an option,” Bodhi says. “We all would.”

“You are much braver than I was at your age,” Galen says. “I wish you didn't have to be.”

Things are becoming slowly clear in Bodhi's head, like the intensity of a storm is passing. Galen looks no less beautiful, and it makes Bodhi no less warm, but the warmth hits him somewhere in his chest, instead of his gut. Everything's relocating. He has to do the same; farther than just across the road, from one flowerbed to the next.

They sit at the table and watch the morning fade until every house on the street has rooves shining with sun, and doorsteps hidden in shadow. Bodhi stares down his parents' house and sinks deeper into his chair, trying to keep every last second of this that he can.

In the hallway again, Galen presses Bodhi's favourite book on airplane schematics into his hands, and tells him to keep it. Bodhi slings the hockey bag up onto his back and tries to look at anything other than Galen.

“If my parents ask where I am, tell them you don't know,” he says.

Galen steps forward, and wraps his arms around Bodhi. Bodhi sags into him, suddenly on the edge of tears; he'd thought this would be gone now.

“You must promise me you'll be safe,” Galen murmurs, his lips buzzing on the side of Bodhi's head. “There's more going on here than even you know.”

“I will.”

Bodhi clings; can't help it. Galen still feels like what he always thought home would. When they pull apart, Galen carefully presses a kiss to Bodhi's forehead, and for one moment, Bodhi's out, he's escaped, he's melting into the air like he's made of light.

“You're a good dad,” Bodhi tells him.

When Galen smiles, Bodhi feels like he's finally managed to give him something back. He's done enough.

It's okay.

****

Bodhi finds Cassian in the same stairwell he'd caught him kissing Jyn in. School is almost up; Bodhi is supposed to be leaving to deliver a message right about now. Who is he to disobey orders?

“I don't know what this says, but I think you'll know what to do with this more than me,” Bodhi says. Cassian looks very seriously from his face down to the envelope Bodhi is offering, and slowly takes it.

“Is this why the Partisans don't trust you?” he asks.

“Maybe,” says Bodhi. “Your dad is with the FBI?”

Cassian glances around them quickly, and nods.

“Give that to him.”

“I'll make it blow up,” Cassian promises. “You gonna be okay?”

“Yeah,” Bodhi says. “Tell Jyn she's lucky.”

He darts forward, and gives Cassian a kiss on the cheek, because today seems to be the day to throw caution to the wind and do these kinds of things. Cassian looks a little surprised, but not angry. Not angry at all.

Jyn catches him at the edge of the school property, just as he's clearing the fence. The bell's gone, and she's supposed to be inside, but he's never known her to do what she's told.

“Does this mean I won't see you in detention later?” she calls.

Bodhi's still got one foot up on the fence, and through the chain link, she is cut into many pieces, each as brilliant as the last, like the facets of a crystal. He has the strange, sudden thought that he would follow her into death.

“Maybe not for a while,” he says. “Take care of them, yeah?”

“I will.”

“You can find me at Jedha,” Bodhi says. He yanks his foot to the ground and takes off before he can lose his nerve, heart pounding. He's really doing this. For once in his life, he's flying.

When he reaches the corner, he looks back, and Jyn is still there, watching him. At this distance, she doesn't look so much like Galen, as Galen looks like her. Bodhi drinks it in nonetheless, one last time. Love looks good on her. One day, maybe it'll look good on him.

****

“Is your couch still free?”

Chirrut smiles like a sunrise. He pulls the door open, and Bodhi, as a flower does, follows him.

**Author's Note:**

> the next few seconds: 
> 
> "Baze!" Chirrut yells. "You thought he would be later, but here he is, just when I said he would be! I told you you just needed to have faith!"
> 
> "And I needed more time to clean this couch!"
> 
> (bodhi dithers while they argue. he is happy to be there)
> 
> ANYWAY
> 
> thank you for reading this if you made it all the way to the end! it is my strange child, much like bodhi is. i don't have tumblr, so if anyone wants to share this there, feel free to make your own post! that would be cool
> 
> (spoilers/triggers: references to human trafficking)


End file.
